"If you care a lot about the future, it shows that you believe in what you're doing now and you think it's worthwhile enough to have some lasting impact." – Syd Mead

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Month: December 2013

Christina Engelbart posted a page on her site to mention places that commemorated the 45th Anniversary of Doug Engelbart’s (her father’s) “Mother of All Demos.” The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA did an event on Dec. 9, the date of the demo, to talk about it, what was accomplished from it, and what from it has yet to be brought into our digital world. There have been some other anniversary events for this demo in the past, but this one is kind of poignant I think, because Doug Engelbart passed away in July. Maybe C-SPAN will be showing it?

I was intrigued by this line in the description of the CHM event:

Some of the main records of his laboratory at SRI are in the Museum’s collection, and form a crucial part of the CHM Internet History Program.

Since I heard about what an admirable job the Augmentation Research Center had done in building NLS architecturally, I’ve been curious to know, “How can today’s developers take a look at what they did, so they could learn something from it?”

The reason I particularly wanted to point out this commemoration, though, is one of the pages Christina referenced was a post by Brad Neuberg demonstrating HyperScope, a modern, web-based system that implements some of the document and linking features of NLS, and Engelbart’s original Augment system (NLS was renamed “Augment” in the late 1970s). Watching Engelbart’s demo gives one a flavor of what it was like to use it, and its capabilities, but it doesn’t lend itself to helping the audience understand how it deals with information, and how it operates–why it’s an important artifact–beyond being dazzled by what was accomplished 45 years ago. Watching Brad’s videos gives one a better sense of these things.